The Grand Illusion Of Travel Photography

As soon as I arrived in Santorini I felt betrayed. I rolled my bag through the narrow streets of its main town Fira, a place of stunning, dramatic beauty, and thought to myself: I've been duped again.

You know Santorini, perhaps the most spectacular of all the Greek islands, even if you've never been there. It is one of the most-photographed places in the world. Its tumbly, white-washed villages, perched on cliffs above a vast blue sea, land regularly on the covers of calendars and coffee-table books. You cannot have walked into a bookstore in the last five years and not seen a picture of its painted domes and cobbled steps. It is the Frida Kahlo of travel idolatry.

When you finally see the three-dimensional place, after the necessarily subpar drive up from the port, it is, of course, more moving than any photograph. The domes have volume; the steps, steepness. What you have seen ad nauseamly reproduced turns out to be uniquely, unquestionably real. The camera hasn't made it up.

But it hasn't quite come clean on the place either. For in all those pictures there are never any people. And, not seeing a human presence, we imagine it: the old sea captain fingering his beads, the whiskered widow draped in black. People as picturesque as their surroundings.

And in Santorini, in summer, they don't exist. It's not just that the streets are crammed with tourists, they are depleted of locals. I don't know if I've ever seen a place so completely given over to tourism. The shops all seem to sell one of two things, jewelry and souvenirs, and the assistants in them are often Bulgarians or Poles, working for the season before heading back to school. Fira and Ia are like captured towns from which all the residents have fled, abandoning their homes to the marauders in T-shirts.

Of course, I knew there would be lots of tourists in Santorini, I just didn't expect them to give the place the anonymous population of an international airport. And for this I blame travel photography.

It's not a new complaint. In 1990, I flew to Guadeloupe. It was my first trip to the Caribbean. I had read novels and travel books about the place, and gotten my visual knowledge of it from postcards, coffee-table books and travel publications. It was, I knew, a world of palm-fringed beaches and gingerbread houses in inviting pastels. When I arrived in Pointe--Pitre, and was driven past limping dogs to my concrete bunker hotel, I felt as if I had taken the wrong plane.

Intellectually, we all understand that a place is never as idyllic as pictures make it appear. But when an image of beauty and perfection is repeated so incessantly, as happens in travel photography, we begin, even if subconsciously, to believe it.

So tourists flock to Santorini because they've been inspired by gorgeous photographs of the place that show no tourists. And the more tourists visit, the less the place resembles the photographs.

A further irony is that, while I was bemoaning the camera's deception, I was often waiting for tourists to move out of my viewfinder. For I needed to take pictures too, and I didn't want them marred by crop-topped reality.

Not because they would explode the myth (I'm writing this column, aren't I?) but because they wouldn't be interesting shots. The photo editor would pass right over them. This is travel photography's fundamental flaw: It is extremely difficult to take a beautiful picture of blight. And it demonstrates the comparative superiority of travel writing, in which it is quite possible to pen a pleasing paragraph about ugliness. (Not to mention that photography informs only one of our senses.)

My last day in Santorini I passed a cafe out of which the songs of Buena Vista Social Club floated. A Frenchman stood in the street, his head buried in his video camera. "There's Cuban music," he commented, half to his wife, half to the camera. "Which is totally out of place. Yet somehow it works."

It was a scene that seemed to say a lot about Santorini. But I didn't take a picture of it.